Boris Andreevich Pilnyak was born Boris Wogau in 1984 in the provincial town of Mozhaisk, of mixed Russian, Tatar, German and Jewish blood. He spent his childhood in provincial towns of central Russia, starting school in Saratov, finishing it in Nizhny-Novgorod. Later he completed an economics course in the Moscow Commercial Institute. He was first published in 1909, and began his career as a serious writer for thick literary journals in 1915. Three small books preceded The Naked Year—the novel which established his reputation.